Surviving Second Year · Introduction

Submitted by co60ca on Wed, 06/29/2016 - 14:40

As an introduction I would like to assert that nothing said in this post covers all situations and view points that are present. The topics presented are what advice I can draw from personal experience as a Helpdesk TA and with discussions with other upper year students. The list is ordered in my order of importance.

Surviving Second Year · Courses to pay particular attention to

Submitted by co60ca on Wed, 06/29/2016 - 14:40

These courses are very important to pay special attention to as the knowledge gained in these courses are used in future years and you may have to spend extra study time in future years in order to catch up if you forget key concepts from these courses. I am not including any first year courses as they give a background into computer science but I expect that you are already past those courses if you are reading this.

Math 1P98 Statistics - The concepts in this course will give you background in statistical reports that you will write in later years.

The Brock Press and Internet Security and Privacy with Flash

Submitted by co60ca on Wed, 06/29/2016 - 14:39

The Brock Press website appears to include scripts from Facebook which allow Facebook to track the users from Facebook who have active cookies there. (Or just about anyone who has been on Facebook) This may have been done unknowingly by the developer of the site or The Brock Press. This allows Facebook to understand which sites, including The Brock Press, users of Facebook are visiting and target ads to them when they are on Facebook. Another use of tracking cookies is to potentially sell their browsing history to other companies.

How Snapchat and Other Apps Invade You and Your Contacts Privacy

Submitted by co60ca on Wed, 06/29/2016 - 14:27

With regards to free apps or web services it become commonly known that `if you are not the customer you are product` but in recent years the sale and collection of personal information has become more aggressive. The topic of discussion for this article is Snapchat and the ramification of the gathering of personal information and it's affect on not only your privacy but others privacy you are in contact with.

Minimizing a GUI application after auto starting with systemd

Submitted by co60ca on Wed, 06/29/2016 - 14:26

I ran into a problem that on my Arch Linux install with Teamviewer (for which I use for non lan remote access). I am able to use systemctl to start the teamviewerd on startup but this doesn't make the desktop environment accessible automatically on startup. In order to start the teamviewer user interface. Normally this would be simple, just run the command from a systemd user script that runs theteamviewer program on startup. The problem with this is teamviewer starts with the GUI open and there is no way to change this. This is a personal pet-peeve of mine.

Switching My Hosting to namecheap

Submitted by co60ca on Wed, 06/29/2016 - 14:24

It was quite difficult, support was AMAZING but they were having issues with their FTP server not accepting some of the ports that Filezilla were expecting, they were very knowledgeable and willing to work with me on something they could pass off as a client issue. Beyond that I was surprised how simple it was for some things and how laborious it was for others.

The weirdest thing I experienced was the difference in settings. For instance, namecheap appears to run in php developers mode by default. So, error messages are reported to the client.

Canadian ISP Eastlink Injects Piracy Notifications into HTML

Submitted by co60ca on Wed, 06/29/2016 - 14:19

HTTPS is important for a lot of reasons, first of all it prevents snooping in on your browsing allowing for privacy between you and the destination. Another thing it prevents is the potential for people to modify content before it gets to you. The biggest case for this was seen with the recent attack on github.com by The great firewall of china. The aforementioned link was a serious problem that could have been mitigated by the use of HTTPS.

HTTPS Everywhere! At least on co60.ca

Submitted by co60ca on Wed, 06/29/2016 - 14:19

I was able to get a certificate from StartCom that allowed me to bring my website to the 21 century. The conversion was mostly painless. My site already used relative url's in links (except some drupal content) and also give me the ambition to fix some of the nastly looking url strings. (blog.html now goes to /blog/) which looks a lot nicer.

Took about half an hour including the request, installation, and editing of some key sections of my site. If you have a personal blog and need a free ssl certificate try them out. It was reasonably painless.

libvirtd fails with invalid argument: Failed to parse group ‘kvm’

Submitted by co60ca on Wed, 06/29/2016 - 14:05

libvirtd fails with invalid argument: Failed to parse group ‘kvm’

Tuesday, May 5, 2015 - 23:12

QEMU and it’s extention KVM require a tiny bit of configuration and VM configuration is made easier through libvirtd which acts as an API. Since I couldn’t find assistance when searching for the particular stack of errors I got when running systemctl enable libvirtd on my new box I’ll go ahead and post it here.